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Preparing Your Book For Publishing by Christina De Mello

Well, first of all, I’d like to say that I feel it's best that you do as much editing of your own as you can. Not only will you get a quicker response from the publishers, but it also saves them a lot of time. They can get the book out faster if there are fewer mistakes. So, when I first started writing my stories, I was so enthused by the barrage of ideas which came rushing in, that I didn’t really bother too much about punctuation or grammar. I’ve been working on this book for the last four years and from time to time, I would go back to the stories and check the editing over and over again - like a dog with a bone - for all the mistakes I had made. Besides that, MS Office Word is a great help, not only for their little squiggly red and green lines, but also for the little icon at the bottom of the page for proofing errors which checks spelling, grammar, etc. There’s also a little inverted P at the top of the page for showing spacing errors. You don’t want to see words running one into the other when it's printed.Most of my editing was already done before I sent it to the publishers, M/s Leadstart Publishing Pvt. Ltd., Mumbai. Once they accepted my book, they passed it on to a senior editor, Dr. Surojit Mohan Gupta, who also happens to live in Lucknow and is a visiting professor to the University of Hawaii. Click on the look inside of The Phaulkon Legacy by Walter Strach on Amazon, which has been edited by him. I’m proud to say that Dr. Gupta so enjoyed my stories and found so few corrections to make, that he edited half the book in just one day and finished off the other half by the next morning. However, I wanted it to be even more perfect, so it went back and forth between us a couple of times, actually for about three months, till I was fully satisfied with the pace and the twist at the end of each story.Ultimately, I was happy with the end result. Christina De Mello has just had her first book,CHAMELEON, published. It is a collection of short stories of paranormal fiction, which she prefers to call supernatural fiction as she normally doesn't employ the vampires and werewolves so beloved of paranormal authors nowadays. Christina is Indian born and bred, with Portuguese and British antecedents and was born in the historic city of Lucknow in north India. She has spent quite a few years in the equally historical city of Kolkata too. When she retires from the workforce, she plans to move to Goa with her grown up son, where she hopes to be able to devote more time to her writing.CHRISTINA DE MELLO ON THE WEB:Blog/WebsiteFacebook Twitter

CHAMELEON

A collection of short stories dealing with the supernatural by debut Indian author Christina De Mello. Currently available in print only, it should be released as an ebook soon.

I agree that it is so important to edit and edit and edit. I went over my book a million times before I started sending it off. Of course, there are still mistakes and things I need to learn- but I did the best job I could. :) Loved this advice. Wishing Christina the best of luck. Chameleon sounds great!~Jess

Very important to make our submissions rise above the pack. Had an editor tell me once that my manuscript was the cleanest punctuation-wise she'd ever seen. And she ended up accepting my story, to boot!